Boulevard of A Broken Dream

As you would have read from the previous post, my buddy Praveen and I were heading to Northern Europe towards the Arctic region to see the Northern Lights. This was a trip 11 months in the making and was supposed to be one of the tick marks on our "Things to see in life" list.

The map here is an illustration of the ground we would cover in order to get to Tromso, the theatre at which we had bought tickets to watch one of the greatest natural shows on earth.

After a week of meandering through some of the nicest cities in Northern Europe, we would land in Tromso only to be greeted by foul weather that only got worse. Cloud cover everywhere, snow, rain, muggy climate and cold as hell. We wondered how we were going to get a glimpse of Aurora and her majesty in this weather. The perpetual optimists we are, we kept our hopes high. We had hired the services of an "Aurora Hunter", someone who knew the best spots around Tromso and the northern part of Norway to see the magical lights. All we could do now was to put our faith in the skills and the experience of this Aurora Superhero. In the end, the weather was this Superman's Kryponite! He cancelled the tour at the last minute citing bad weather and a mystery virus that he had contracted just that day. So we were left with nothing to gaze at but the cloudy evening sky from the confines of our room. We had braved bitter cold only to be left out in the cold when it came to the reason we were there in the first place.

This blog post marks the first in a series of posts (one for each day) on the things that we did, the places that we visited and the route we followed.

The only reason I am putting this up is that some people may benefit from our misfortune and find this information useful while planning their own trips.